The Measure of All Things
by Laurie M
Summary: A series of vignettes from 'Bulletville' to 'Bloody Harlan'. COMPLETE.
1. The Woods

**Author Note:** _Justified_ ain't mine. Sadly. Comments welcome.

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><p><em>1. The Woods<em>

They haven't got far when he stops, breathing hard and one arm hanging limp.

She still has his blood on her hands, remembers its sticky warmth, and wipes her fingers on her jeans reflexively.

'Go on,' he tells her.

'Where are you going?'

'Back.'

'But Raylan-'

'Could probably use a hand. And those people killed my daddy.'

They stare at each other and he doesn't move, doesn't take the few steps towards her. He points through the trees. 'Keep going straight. You'll get to the road. You'll be safe.'

Still she hesitates. Despite everything, or perhaps because of it, it's hard to leave him, here, now.

'Go on. Ava, go.'

She starts running, twigs snapping under her feet and leaves sliding. A few paces, she looks back and he's still standing, his eyes still on her.

When she looks back again, he's gone.


	2. The Motel

_2. The Motel_

She turns down the offer of a ride back to Harlan. She's had more than enough of the hospitality of the Marshal Service and the thought of spending a few hours more with one of them in a car is more than she can bear.

But after her taxi has taken a few turnings she decides to make a stop for the one marshal to whom she does have something to say. Only courtesy, after all, to thank him for saving her. Helping to save her. And for that she is grateful. The picture builds, the little speech that she works out in her head: she'll be dignified, businesslike, and he'll feel small and regret what he did to her.

She tells the driver to wait and gets out of the taxi and it isn't Raylan she sees outside of the motel, but another figure even more familiar. Arm strapped across his chest, he fumbles with keys and tries to get the door of his truck open. He hears her approach, looks at her and it's like he isn't really seeing her. Not something she's used to with Boyd and that difference unsettles her.

'Raylan isn't here.' The words come out slow, voice soft.

Her eyes drift to the closed door and the crime-scene tape; she catches her breath. 'What the hell?'

'Two of them were after Arlo. My daddy's men. Raylan shot them.'

'Of course he did.'

He leans heavily against the side of the truck and his breathing is laboured. She looks at him uncertainly, fiddles with the strap of her bag, her fingers closing around it. The leather is worn, cracked, dry and flaking under the pressure of her grasp.

'Shouldn't you still be in hospital?'

'I discharged myself.'

'Does the hospital know that?'

There's a twitch at the corners of his mouth, fleeting, or maybe it's just the play of shadow across his face. 'Well, I'm sure that by now they do.'

The air is thick, laden with diesel and the threat of rain and her skin tautens against its chill. She tosses the hair back from her shoulders. 'You going back to your ... church?'

Everything in him shivers, coiling back to a dead centre and he looks at her from eyes that used to burn. 'My men-' His voice sinks lower, a breath of agony she can barely hear. 'My men are all dead. My daddy, he strung them up in the trees, he shot them. They believed in me. They believed in me, Ava.'

He seems to see her then and looks at her as though she has the answers. An answer. Anything. He'll take anything and she doesn't think that she has any of it to give. She's never seen a man flayed before but now, she thinks, now she has. That is what it's like to be so raw, every nerve exposed and screaming. What she sees behind his gaze hurts too much and she looks away from him.

'So,' she asks of the piece of path that leads to Raylan's steps, 'where will you go?'

'I don't rightly know.'

She looks at him again and the rise and fall of his chest and the white bandage stark against his sombre clothes. She pays off the taxi and comes back to him, taking the keys from his hand. 'You're in no state to drive, wherever it is you're _not_ going to.'

They drive largely in silence. Every now and then his head nods down on his chest, eyes closed, until he wakes with a grunt of pain, shifts in the seat. She should take him back to the hospital, she thinks, no matter what he says, but she knows he'd just take himself right back out again and God knows what would happen then.

She turns on the radio. The song isn't one that she recognises but she likes it. She glances at Boyd and despite the prolonged silence he isn't asleep; he's listening to the music, staring at nothing in particular. They drive.

When they reach her house she climbs out of the truck and doesn't give him the chance to say anything, doesn't give herself the chance to think anything, just heads for her front door. She still has his keys. He can follow her or not, as he chooses.

He's still moving slowly. When he does finally make it into the house she keeps her back to him. 'You can stay here tonight,' she says. The screen door whines, then the front door closes softly, locks clicking into place. She goes into the kitchen.

A bottle of Wild Turkey that she's tried to hide from herself at the back of a cupboard is brought back out, and a glass. Two glasses. She needs a drink and he looks like he could do with one. Or ten. And perhaps she owes him the same courtesy she does Raylan: Boyd also helped to save her, after all.

It's a different speech that she has in her head but still one that she doesn't get to give. He's slumped sideways on her couch, face pressed into the cushions, and she experiences a moment of fear, a sudden stab of it, but then she hears his ragged breathing. Even asleep he still doesn't look at peace, pain and exhaustion etched too deeply into his face. The bruises around his cheek and jaw look livid, angry purplish-black, but there are no marks on his hands; she wonders why he would take a beating and not fight back.

Ava stands over him, stretches out a hand to wake him then pulls it back. She kneels, pulls off his heavy boots, lifts his feet until he's lying fully on the couch and covers him with a blanket. He barely stirs, muttering something that she doesn't hear before sinking back into his own private hell.

She takes the bottle back into the kitchen, returns it to its hiding place behind the tins of soup that she never uses, replaces one of the glasses in the cabinet, fills the other with water from the tap and goes upstairs.


	3. The Agreement

_3. The Agreement_

When she comes down the next morning she half-expects him to be gone but he's still there, folding up the blanket she had put over him. He straightens when he hears her, holds himself very upright, very still. 'I'm sorry, Ava, I had meant to be on my way before now.'

She shrugs. 'It's okay. You want some breakfast?'

He takes in a breath, deep, holds it, lets it out. 'Thank you, no. I have no wish to encroach on your hospitality any further, although I do greatly appreciate it.'

She folds her arms, tosses the hair away from her face. Her eyes feel gritty from lack of sleep and every time she turns her head it throbs dully from the rifle-butt strike. She can feel the lump at the back of her head, tender under her fingers when she touches it, but then she's used to that. 'You decided where it is you're going?'

His head shakes. 'No.' He stands on the edge of a patch of early morning sunlight cutting across the floor, dust-motes rotating in a languid golden haze. It shimmers between them.

Her lips press together. 'No liquor in the house - that goes for both of us. No criminal activity of any kind. You do anything that I find even the littlest bit offensive and I kick you out. Stick to those rules and we'll get on just fine.'

He blinks at her slowly, owl-like, tilts his head. 'I don't-'

She puts her eyebrows up, her chin lifting. 'Bowman left me with a mortgage that I can't pay on my own. You can rent out the spare room.' Her weight transfers from one foot to the other. 'The mattress is lumpy and the window only opens halfway.' Bowman, in one of his rare moods of improvement; he had re-painted the room and painted the window shut. Somehow that had ended up being her fault, too. She'd laughed, she remembers, she'd laughed because it had been _funny. _Bowman hadn't thought so. She pushes the memory back down, fitting it alongside all the others. 'It ain't much but you're-' she catches a breath '-you're welcome to it.'

It's the same lack of movement as in the woods; she wouldn't have thought that someone who had always torn such a quicksilver path through life could be capable of so much stillness. 'Why?'

She looks around the room, eyes restless. 'You said if there was anything you could do to make amends.'

'As I recall, that involved my not setting foot here again. And I understand fully why you feel that way.'

'Well... I've had time to think it over and I've changed my mind. That's a woman's pre- pe-'

'Prerogative,' he says gently.

'Yes. And I've decided that this is what you can do.' The robe she wears is heavier than is usual for this time of year, crossed high at the throat, the belt pulled tight. The cord bites into her waist. 'I'll make some breakfast; you might as well sit down.'

He sinks more than sits, sucking in a breath and his face tightening.

She's been in enough pain in her life not to enjoy seeing someone else that way. 'There's some stuff upstairs, something Bowman had for when his back was out-'

'No.' Eyes drift closed, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead.

'Doesn't it hurt?'

His eyes open again and his lips pull back in a rictus smile. 'More than you know.'

Uncertainty and a kind of acceptance coils itself around them. She pulls the belt tighter and goes into the kitchen.


	4. The Ghosts

_4. The Ghosts_

_**haunt** - v. _

_**1** tr. (of a ghost) visit (a place) regularly, reputedly giving signs of its presence_

_**2** tr. (of a memory, person etc.) be persistently in the mind of_

For the first few weeks it's like living with a phantom. Unaccustomed noises in the house, objects that vanish then reappear and knowing that she hadn't moved them - sometimes they're the only way to tell she has acquired a house-mate.

It isn't like on TV. There are no giggly chats, no shared intimacies. Despite their proximity the substances of their lives barely brush against each other. He eats and reads and sleeps and when she sees him, sometimes, as she's heading out to work, or when she gets back, or when they take a strained, uncomfortable meal together, he seems better, at least physically. Everything about him is still contained, controlled, as though the idea of coming into contact with something like living is its own peculiar agony. He shrouds himself in stillness and silence, making himself invisible to the world.

And to her.

He keeps out of her way. That doesn't mean that she is unaware of him; if anything, his attempts to erase the signs of his presence make her all the more aware of the reality of him there, in her house, behind the closed door just off the top of the stairs.

She's aware of him even when she isn't in the house.

The scissor-blades flash under the salon's neon strip lighting and she listens with half an ear to the rambling monologue about her client's visit to Nashville. The hair curled between her fingers and the _snip-snip-snip_, the chemical smell of bleach and dye and setting lotion. A song on the radio and she recognises it as the same one that had played when she had driven them back from Lexington.

She wonders about change, and wants to believe in it, and about redemption and hope. She wonders what would take the fire from a man's eyes and what it would take to restore it.

She finds herself worrying about him.

But it isn't only Boyd who hovers constantly, uneasily, on the edges of her mind. It had been easier when she was drinking more to blank out the things she would sooner forget, but it would still take an awful lot of liquor to get rid of so much.

As brothers they had been close, more or less, but had never really been much alike, never looked much alike. Boyd was a little taller than Bowman but far slighter, his frame lean and wiry against his brother's bulk. Bowman had been his father's son, the same broad shoulders and strangely graceful swagger. Thick muscle that had, in later years, been running inevitably to fat. Boyd had his mother's looks and Ava remembered her well: a tall, slender woman, softly spoken with humorous green eyes and steel in her spine.

Boyd isn't Bowman-

_-No, he's worse_-

She smiles grimly to herself. Naturally, he's worse because Boyd is a criminal but Bowman was just a wife-beater. He's killed a man, perhaps more than one, but she's also killed a man and she knows that's a big deal but she also knows it isn't the worst thing you can do. Experience makes everything relative.

As brothers they had not been much alike but sometimes there's a cadence to Boyd's voice, a gesture, a way of looking and she sees someone else.

Boyd isn't Bowman. She knows that. She has always known that.

Her hands, suddenly damp, slip around the handles and the blade slices against her skin, bright blood oozing from her thumb. It is everywhere. She stands, dumb, watching the drops fall, feeling the sting until Jodie takes her by the shoulders, leads her to the back-room, lectures her - severe and concerned - and Ava smiles, nods, tastes the salty tang of the blood. Jodie pulls at her hand, rinses it, binds her thumb and sends her back out to finish Miss Nashville's do.

When she's back home she peels off the plaster, examines the reddish-brown stain against her skin and the split running the length of the soft pad of her thumb. It throbs dully but she's known worse. She gets a glass of water, half-filling it with ice; she holds one piece against the cut, numbing it.

From upstairs faint music trickles out from behind his door and she thinks that it wouldn't be so bad if they actually talked to each other now and then.

One day.

Maybe.


	5. The Box

_5. The Box_

She helps him move his things into the spare room, not that there's much to put there. She wonders how anyone could get through life and have so little, and remembers Raylan's motel room and figures that some people just prefer it that way. Her house is a chronicle of her life and sometimes she wishes it wasn't.

Most of his stuff stays where it is, boxes and black plastic bags neatly stacked against one small portion of wall. He only takes out the things that seem the most important to him: a radio, some CDs, books. A lot of books. She's never understood his devotion to the written word. She isn't stupid, far from it, but she's never been book-smart, not the way Boyd is. He uses words like they are something special, things to be respected, not just sounds. He rolls them around his mouth as though enjoying the feel of them, the shape they take; sometimes there's delight in his face when he speaks them - hearing them hanging in the air is a source of pleasure.

She doesn't understand it but she admires it. It's why she always enjoyed hearing him talk, not the neo-nazi bullshit and all the other craziness, but when he'd just talk. From her post in the kitchen or out on the porch she'd listen, laugh to herself sometimes when the conversation would stutter to a halt when Bowman stopped understanding what Boyd was saying.

He'd try to make fun of Boyd and his books and his words, but only half-heartedly. Sometimes she thought it was because it scared him a little, this evidence of intelligence; but mainly, though, she thought it was because no matter what Bowman said he couldn't get a rise out of his brother. Boyd didn't care what Bowman's opinion on the matter was; he didn't seem to care much for the opinion of anyone on anything.

She admires that, too.

They don't talk about Bowman.

It is not something that has been decided on, but their mutual silence on the subject - _her_ husband, _his_ brother - is a tacit agreement.

She wonders if Boyd misses him. If there is a part of him that hates her for what she did. Sometimes _she_ hates her for what she did but she'd do it again if she had to.

The first time Bowman had hit her she couldn't quite believe that it had happened. Afterwards, when she was sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing herself with her hands, he had knelt at her feet and begged her forgiveness, arms around her waist, face buried in her lap, and wept. She had stroked his hair like he'd been a child. He was often childlike: full of dreams and ideas and furious at anyone who he thought was in his way - and that person was usually Ava. He'd bought an expensive steak and pressed it against the bruises around her eye and promised her it would never happen again. He always promised that and for a long time she had wanted to believe him.

That was the thing that people didn't understand about her and Bowman: he could be sweet when he wanted and she had been young and for a long time she had loved him.

She has a box of her own. The figurines that have stood on her dresser are something she can't stand to look at anymore. Her house is the chronicle of her life and it is just that: her house, her life.

The porcelain figures are picked up carefully and placed in the box, a final exorcism.

Sometimes she misses him. Sometimes she remembers how nice he could be, sometimes she wonders if things would have been different if she'd had a child, then she thinks about the reality and while she can still remember the tearing agony of it all she's glad there was never a child to be in the middle of all of that.

She should donate the box and its brittle contents but she can't stand the thought of those placid figures adorning someone else's dresser or mantle-piece or coffee table. Her fingers uncurl from the cardboard edges and she watches it fall.

The crash brings Boyd out of his room. For a moment they stand on the landing; he looks at her, she looks at the box, then he steps forward, crouches over it.

'What-' He frowns and looks up. Bowman had probably told him how much she loved them. He would have been so pleased, telling his brother about how he would make everything okay with a tacky piece of crap he'd probably picked up at the store by the gas station. Maybe he has questions but if he does maybe it's what he sees in her face that stops them. He folds the flaps of the box over the shattered bodies, hiding their broken faces, picks it up, heads down the stairs and out the door. She goes back into her bedroom.

_Her_ bedroom. Singular.

She hears him come back in, his catlike tread on the stairs that she has to listen for to hear. He returns to his room, leaves the door open a crack.

Later she makes coffee, pushes his door open and hands him a mug. He takes a sip, watching her over the rim, places it carefully on the packing case that's doing duty as a bedside table. She stands for a while, drinks some of her coffee, leaves him.

She doesn't see the box or its contents again; she doesn't ask what he did with it, he doesn't tell her, and she doesn't much care.


	6. The Mine

_6. The Mine_

The fabric slides easily between her fingers and she concentrates on the needle and its furious blur of motion. She's always enjoyed sewing, being able to create something that is wholly and only hers, enjoyed the way that she can lose herself in it; the way it quietens the voices in her head. Her mama had taught her, years before she'd passed, and every time Ava sits at the machine she thinks of her.

She's too engrossed with her work to hear anything beyond the whirr of the engine and she only becomes aware of him when the door rattles.

'Twice in one day,' she says after a moment, looking at him over her shoulder. He'd been out earlier, for an hour maybe two - when he returned she hadn't asked where he'd been and he had not volunteered the information. Now again and she's curious, not least because he's holding what looks like Bowman's old lunch tin under one arm.

'I'm going to work.'

She blinks, digesting this. Her first thought is that his shoulder hasn't fully healed and her second that for a man with his history it's hard to get legal work in Harlan County. Hell, it's hard to get it when a man's been straight his whole life. It's afternoon, coming on for evening, and she hates the sudden finger of suspicion but just can't seem to help it. She turns in her chair. 'Where?'

'The mine.'

Of all the things she might have guessed at - and she isn't certain what they may have been - this would not have been one of them. 'The mine,' she repeats, doubt colouring her voice.

'Apparently they appreciate my facility with Emulex.'

She watches him closely and she sees it: the faint quirk around his lips, the flare in his eyes that dies all too soon. It's a joke, of a sort.

'Facility. Is that what you're calling it these days?'

It's there again, then gone. They look at each other.

The work patterns are familiar enough to her for her to know that he's working the night shift - familiar enough to know that there's still time in hand before it starts and it doesn't take that long to drive up to the shaft.

'You're heading out early, aren't you?'

He hesitates. 'You have had the generosity and the mercy to allow me into your home and I have no intention of breaking any of the conditions that you have laid down. But I need a drink.'

'Where are you going?'

Another hesitation; he doesn't look away from her. 'Audrey's.'

She purses her lips, her eyebrows rising. 'Well, you be careful, Boyd; you don't know where those girl have been.'

He smiles again, slightly. His eyes stay on her face and his voice is still soft and careful. 'Oh, Ava. I have no interest in those young ladies.'

He seems to pass through the door without opening it. She still sits for a while, listening to the silence that pours into the house, then turns back to hemming her skirt. The material is similar to a dress she had years ago, something else she had made herself. A pale buttery lemon scattered with tiny white dots. She had loved that dress. She had been wearing it the day the mine had collapsed.

The sirens had torn through the town, everyone knowing what had happened. Fire and smoke on the skyline. She had been in the diner and through the window, on the other side of the street, Boyd's beat old pick-up truck had pulled up and two figures had eased themselves out. Usually when they walked together she could tell them apart: Raylan's slow, easy, long strides; Boyd a compact controlled swagger. Then they were both stiff and awkward and coated in a layer of coal dust.

She had crossed the street to them, fully aware of how she looked in the fine cotton dress that her mama had helped her to make, that showed off her curves. Raylan was nineteen. She was sixteen. She was old enough.

He didn't notice her until-

'Hey, Ava.'

Boyd's disconcertingly direct stare that she always had to steel herself to meet.

'Boyd.' Then she smiled. 'Hey, Raylan.'

His head bowed, he raised his eyes to her, uncertain and shy. 'Hi, Ava.'

It was unpleasantly hot, a humid day; the air felt thin and grubby, like it had already passed through a hundred people before it got to them. A skin of high cloud muffled the sun but trapped its heat. She pulled the hair away from her neck.

'I heard what happened at the mine.' The left knee of Boyd's jeans was torn; Raylan's hair was black with dust. 'Did everyone make it out okay?'

'Yes...' Raylan looked at Boyd. 'Yes, everyone made it out.' He coughed, cleared his throat. 'Boyd-'

Boyd grinned suddenly, a true smile, his teeth startlingly white in the sooty mask of his face. 'I'll see you tomorrow, Raylan Givens.' He climbed back into his truck, started the engine and roared down the street.

She stood close to Raylan, watching the rise and fall of his chest but he didn't look at her; he stared after the truck, an intense serious look. He was often intense and serious but this was something else.

She had seen the echo of that look that night, all those years later, when Raylan had knelt beside Boyd's body. He'd pulled the cloths off the dining room table, pressed them against the gaping wound in Boyd's chest, staunching the blood, trying to save the life of the man he had just shot.

A life for a life.

And that's why Raylan had been sorry. And, finally, she understands.


	7. The Paycheck

_7. The Paycheck_

She pulls open the envelope - bulky, worn at the corners - that he hands her, and her eyes widen.

'Dammit, Boyd, I didn't mean for you to give your whole paycheck.'

His eyes are shadowed, troubled - _more troubled_ - and he frowns. 'Nothing would please me more than if that were so, but I must confess it isn't.' He takes a breath. 'My cousin Johnny...'

'Oh.'

She stares at the packet in her hands, feeling its thickness. They don't talk about Johnny but not in the same way that they don't talk about Bowman. She never minded Johnny all that much - she never really saw that much of him; and she can't say that she's either happy or sad at his survival, it's a simple fact that doesn't impact on her life. They don't talk about Johnny because they don't really talk about the things that happened _before_. She's increasingly aware that their relationship exists either side of a schism: Before Bulletville and After Bulletville.

Or maybe even earlier, she thinks sometimes, maybe it was the night when she stood on her porch with her shotgun and he offered her his apologies and she'd been too suspicious, too afraid to really believe him.

Johnny belongs to Before and she's content to leave him there but still she asks: 'How is he?'

Boyd's hands go into his pockets, shoulders hunching, bracing himself hopelessly against a torment that doesn't come from outside. 'He's alive.' He speaks it as though still existing in the world is not in itself a triumph.

'Johnny made his own choices,' she says sharply. His head tilts back, eyes opaque as glass; she feels a stab of irritation. 'He didn't have to go against Bo, but he would have one way or another. Everyone knew that.'

'Maybe another way wouldn't have got him shot.'

He still thinks of them, his men - _and why wouldn't he_ - and he thinks of Johnny in the same way, but he isn't and she feels like screaming, but she hasn't seen what he has seen. She holds her tongue. She puts the envelope in the drawer where she keeps all of the important letters. 'Are you in for supper?'

There is silence. She looks at him and he's gone back to that glazed look he'd worn for the first weeks _After_, then he shakes himself and his hands come out of his pockets. 'I have a shift.'

Double-shift. She grits her teeth. If he wants to work himself to death to prove a point, then let him.

'There's some leftover meatloaf in the fridge,' she says, and walks past him, out of the kitchen. He can put it in the new lunch tin she'd picked up at the store because she can't stand the sight of him taking Bowman's.

She'd also found Bowman's baseball bat in the hall closet, beaten the tin with it until one was a flattened scrap of metal and the other was splintered, then put them both in the trash.

In the living room she takes the air deep into her lungs and thinks that she needs a cigarette, except that she's left both them and her lighter in the kitchen.

Then she notices that propped against her sewing machine there's a splash of colour: a mass of flowers, wild and untidy and beautiful, vivid in the shaft of sunlight, tied with a ribbon. She approaches them carefully and can catch their scent before she's near them - the heady distillation of warmth and light and joy. She picks them up, buries her face in the bright heads, drinks in their perfume and she can him moving around in the kitchen.


	8. The Letter

_8. The Letter_

He's never been married, never come close as far she knows, and sometimes she wonders why. There had been girlfriends, of course, but never anyone really serious and God knows there were plenty of girls in Harlan, and beyond, who made it very clear they were only too willing to take him on.

Reasons whisper at the corners, tiny voices she's become very good at ignoring.

She stands on the porch, leans against the railings and enjoys the freshness of the breeze. It stirs the chimes she's put up alongside her hanging baskets and they sing, silvery notes reverberating on the scented air. Every now and then the porch swing creaks and a page rustles. It's peaceful and it's nice and she closes her eyes, opens them again at the tearing _put-put-put_ engine when the mailman pulls up. A new mailman, she notes. He jogs lightly up the steps to her, flashing her a grin. Dark hair, crinkled, under his cap, strong teeth, dancing eyes. The housewives of Harlan probably love him, seeing him just makes their day.

He hands her the letter and she signs for it, is treated to another of his studiedly ravishing smile.

'Mrs Crowder.'

'Ms.' The correction is spoken softly.

Ava glances at Boyd. He hasn't moved, doesn't even look up, head still bowed over his book. One finger hovers at the edge of the page, then he turns it. She looks back at the mailman and his smile has slipped, features settling into something wary; he keeps his eyes on Boyd and edges away from her. She watches with amusement, finding a perverse pleasure in the man's discomfiture. He drives away, she pushes the letter, unopened, into her pocket. Such a slight thing but it feels heavy, weighted with every dollar that she owes and doesn't know how to pay.

She stands for a moment, sits in the chair beside the swing, curls one foot under her. She watches him, the focus in his face as he reads, the long fingers that are surprisingly gentle against the pages. Strange, she thinks, that she's forgotten he can be terrifying. She bends slightly, inclining her head, reading the name of the book.

'_The Unbearable Lightness of Being_.' He looks up at her; she smiles wryly. 'Sound like fun.'

One corner of his mouth curls up a fraction. 'Some of it is funny.'

She settles herself in her chair, fiddles with the buckle on her boot. 'What's it about?'

He thinks about it. 'It's about how insignificant life is because we only get the one shot at it and when it's over there's nothing left. That we think we can make a difference to things but we can't, not really.' She nods. She likes proper books, with proper plots, where the detective catches the bad guy and the heroine gets her man. 'It's about people trying to make meaning in their lives because there isn't any inherent meaning.' He pauses. 'That means-'

'I know what inherent means.'

There's a flash of self-reproach across his features. 'Sorry.'

She smiles a little and shrugs. 'It's okay.' She gazes out across the roll of grass that stretches to the mountains and the blue peaks, smoky in the sunshine. 'I don't think I've made much meaning in my life.' When she looks back again he's looking at her with a longing that runs so strong and so deep it seems to startle him. It recedes and somehow he creates more space between them, goes back to his book.

If he looks at her a way she doesn't like, he's out. He's never looked at her like _that _before, not quite like that.

'I'll make some coffee,' she says, unfolds herself from her chair. There's a tremor in the fingers resting on the page she doesn't think he's reading.


	9. The Visitor

_9. The Visitor_

Back when she'd first decided to take Boyd in there had been, vaguely, the thought that it would really piss Raylan off that she had taken in his old friend, or enemy, or obsession, or whatever it was that Boyd was to him that only the two of them could properly understand. She'd be lying to everyone including herself - _and she tries not to do that anymore_ - if she said otherwise but it's been nearly three months since she's seen Raylan and now it is otherwise and when he suggests it she's mad at him. More mad at him. She's still mad at him.

He had been her reward, the thing that would make up for the mistakes she had made, for all the crap that life had thrown her way because she had been stupid enough to fall for Bowman's cute smile and swagger and promise that they'd move to a nice apartment in Lexington and he'd never work down a mine.

She remembers Winona - _grits her teeth_ - remembers Winona telling her it's hard to stay mad at Raylan but she's finding it pretty easy. He picked Winona over her, he even picked Boyd over her, in a way. In the time since Bulletville he hasn't so much as called her just to find out if she's okay. To apologise. Even now he's only here for Boyd; from the start he'd only been at her house - from that first day when she was still scrubbing Bowman's blood off her walls - for Boyd.

They deserve each other, she thinks, and manages to find a little bit of extra mad for Boyd. Just on principle.

Both times he's there Raylan is all business, hand on his hip like he's waiting to draw his gun, eyes watchful and sharp even when his voice is soft and sweet. He studies her face, as though he can tell everything there is about her just from that. She resents it. He warns her about Boyd and she resents that too, because just like he thinks he knows her, all of her, he thinks he's the only person who knows Boyd Crowder, the only one who can make the right call on everything all of the time.

And they both know that isn't true, but you wouldn't guess it from the way he eases himself up onto her porch like he has every right to.

She hadn't needed him the night she found Hestler and his scumbag buddies in her house and she hadn't needed him when she'd faced down Bo Crowder in the back of Johnny's bar, and even before that when she'd smashed a man's face into a steering wheel and liberated herself from the back of his van. She hadn't needed him when she'd driven herself and Boyd back from Lexington and spent one half of the night terrified that he'd bleed to death on her couch and the other half wondering what the hell she'd do with him if he didn't.

So she doesn't need him now, standing in front of her, trying to organise her life for her when he's chosen to have no part in it.

And she's tired of being treated like an idiot - just because she_ had_ been stupid enough to marry Bowman doesn't mean that she _is_ stupid. And just because Raylan had dug coal with Boyd back in the day and they were _bound_, doesn't mean he knows him better than anyone else does, than she does. Factoring in the near twenty years Raylan had been gone from Harlan, she's known Boyd longer than he has - and how she's known him. He's been under her roof these months and she's seen what she's seen and even before that she had thought, believed, that maybe he wanted to start over, carve out a new life for himself, even if it meant tearing at it, hacking at it like coal out of rock.

Raylan hasn't been there, he hasn't seen and they- _she_ doesn't need him.

After he leaves she sits on her porch, for a long time, until shadows slip down the mountain, swaddle the holler in a haze of heather and washed-out indigo. The air cools to early-evening sweetness, falls below that and she shivers against it. The sky deepens and she watches cigarette smoke curl against the velvet blue. Headlights cut across it, flaring as they hit the porch, then die.

She watches him cross the grass from his truck to the porch steps, limbs slow and stiff with the weariness that comes from a long day of work, the tread of his work-boots heavy on the wooden boards. From the day Bowman had started working down the mine he'd been bitter and mean; Boyd never mentions it. He looks relieved, sometimes, when he returns, setting foot back in her house like it's his sanctuary; sometimes he looks relieved to be heading out of it.

It's hard to stay mad, and she hadn't really been to begin with.

'Raylan was here,' she tells him when he reaches the screen door.

'I had surmised that.'

'Twice.'

His hand drops. He sits on the porch swing and he smells of the the earth and coal dust and sweat. 'Well, Ava, it must have set your mind at rest to know that I had nothing to do with the robbery of that Oxy bus.'

She blows out a plume of smoke. 'He didn't have to, I knew that already.' She looks at him and his head tilts to one side. 'I heard you and Dewey talking; I ain't deaf.'

She'd just had her ear pressed to the door and they both know that eavesdropping - to be kind - is the only way she would have heard.

His eyes fix somewhere beyond the edge of the pool of light from the porch lamp; she studies his profile, the fine strong line of his jaw. His chin lifts but his voice, still, doesn't: 'You could have told him that the first time.' No reproach, just a sort of mild curiosity.

'I could. But I don't reckon it's on me to do a marshal's job for him. Besides, Raylan ain't never believed anything anyone told him unless he gone and seen if for himself.'

He smiles then, if you can call it that. 'He's always been an empiricist, that Raylan Givens.'

She runs their conversation in her head and takes a stab at what that means. There's a dictionary somewhere and she thinks that she's going to have to start dipping into it more frequently. She pulls a cigarette out of the pack, rolls it between her fingers, puts it back.

'I smoke too many of these damn things,' she tells him.

He nods.


	10. The Diner

_10. The Diner_

Blueberry pie isn't her favourite but she eats it anyway, alternating mouthfuls with sips of strong black coffee. It's good coffee. She flicks through the magazine she borrowed from the salon, stops at the pages telling how to get the look of various celebrities of dubious alphabetical ranking. There's a dress of berry-red she admires: lace detail, a matching cardigan, a simple style, something she could easily copy; she studies it, taking in the pattern, the lines, making it up in her head. It would look wonderful with her favourite shoes.

Someone eases themselves up onto the stool next to hers and she stiffens, recoils, still with the instinct of self-preservation, relaxes when she recognises Helen Givens.

The older woman smiles pleasantly, nods her head. 'Ava.'

'Helen.' She closes the magazine, slips it into her bag. 'Haven't seen you around these parts much lately.'

'I have had my hands full,' Helen says, grim, spoons sugar into the coffee that arrives for her, wordlessly, from the waitress. They exchange smiles, Helen and the working woman. A faded face, stringy hair pulled back severely and a yellow uniform that doesn't quite fit. Helen watches her thoughtfully as she slops away down the counter, takes some of her coffee. 'I hear you've got Boyd Crowder staying at your place.'

Ava blows out a breath, lips tightening. 'Raylan tell you that?'

'Raylan...' There's a flash across her face too swift for Ava to name. 'We haven't seen much of Raylan since he shot Arlo.'

She frowns. 'He shot- But Boyd said-'

A wry smile: 'Boyd doesn't know the half of it.' Her eyes on Ava's face are speculative and she smiles slightly. 'I daresay Boyd told you what he thought had happened.'

'Oh.'

'And I don't need Raylan telling me what all of Harlan County and probably most of Corbin is talking about.'

Ava's chin lifts. 'Folks around here must be mighty hard up for subjects of conversation if my living arrangements is the best they can come up with.' She pushes away the remains of pie that she hasn't eaten and isn't going to. And waits. 'Well,' she says after a while, 'ain't you going to give me a speech, too?'

Helen's eyebrows go up. 'About what?'

'About how me taking in Boyd is a big mistake, about how much I'll regret it, about how there's a shit tornado on its way and all the rest of it.'

Silence for a moment and Helen's lips twitch. 'Oh, Ava, honey, you're a big girl now. And after all you've been through, and the things you've done, I figure you can handle this one all on your own.' She drinks more of her coffee, stirs in a little more sugar. 'Besides, I always liked Boyd Crowder.'

There's the sharp rattle of crockery taken out of the dishwasher, mugs and plates crashing together.

'I thought there was some kind Harlan law against that - a Givens liking a Crowder.'

Helen laughs, husky in the back of her throat. 'Just because I was damn fool enough to marry Arlo doesn't mean I have to take on all of his bullshit.' She rearranges herself on the stool, leather creaking. 'Boyd's always been his own man, no matter what else - not easy with a daddy like Bo Crowder.'

Even in his worst moments, Bowman had never scared her the way Bo had - and he didn't even need to do anything at all. A flicker from eyes that always glittered, cold, rather than twinkled; a movement of one of those large, heavy hands like a sledgehammer in the air. Of all of them, Bo had always frightened her the most.

She'd never really been afraid of Boyd. Unnerved by him, certainly; made to feel uncomfortable, repeatedly. But she'd never been afraid, only after Bowman died and even then only towards the end when she'd been afraid of everything.

When she thinks about it now, she realises the strangeness of this.

Beside her, Helen slides off the stool, grunting slightly. 'I am getting too old,' she remarks and Ava smiles. She thinks of Helen in lots of different ways but old is never one of them. 'Your pie's getting cold.'

'I'm done with it.' Ava stands, picks her bag from where she'd tucked it under her stool. They face each other and Helen rests a hand lightly on Ava's shoulder. 'You take care of yourself, child.'

Her lips curve, assuming the air of resolution and resignation she's worn for so long. 'Well, no-one else ever has.'

Helen's eyes crinkle. 'Life is long.'


	11. The Nightmare

_11. The Nightmare_

_**nightmare** - n. _

_**1** a frightening or unpleasant dream_

_**2** colloq. a terrifying experience or situation_

_**3** colloq. a haunting or obsessive fear_

She's running through the woods again but this time there is someone after her, a man with his fists and his belt and his face half blown away by a hunting rifle. They blunder through thickets, she trips over the roots of dying trees and hears the crackle of snapping twigs and dried leaves under her feet; branches catch at her hair, snagging it, desiccated fingers that scratch her cheeks. Blood on her hands, thick, viscous, dripping down, leaving a bright trail of red across the woodland floor.

No matter how fast she runs, how far, he's behind her and he's always closing in.

But there is something, someone, else out there and if she can find it, reach it, reach him, she'll be safe. She doesn't need rescuing but she wants sanctuary.

She crashes through a wall of branches and leaves and familiar rough hands grab at her and she wakes, sweating, breathing hard, the sound tearing through her airless bedroom. In her nocturnal frenzy the sheets have wrapped themselves around her like a shroud. She unwinds them, kicks herself free, draws her knees up to her chest, rests her forehead against them and breathes deep, trying to ignore the roar in her ears, blood pounding. The walls seem closer, the whole house shrinking around her, squeezing her until there's nothing left. She eases up from the bed, her nightgown clinging damply to her body; she opens a window wider; a thin tendril of freshness curls into the room, fades into the stuffiness; she catches the scent of a cologne that she knows isn't there, _can't_ be there, but she smells it and her stomach roils.

She cut up his clothes, she smashed the damn figurines that he always thought would make everything better, she systematically changed it from it being _their_ house to _her_ house but still he won't leave her alone.

She'd slept beside him in this room for nearly twenty years and she can still feel him there.

She pulls on her dressing gown, pads down the stairs to the kitchen and walks into a dark figure.

'Goddamnit, Boyd, you scared the shit out of me!' Her heart hammers in her chest.

He holds his empty hands low, away from his sides, an automatic gesture to show that he means her no harm - or as though she's a nervy horse he doesn't want to spook into bolting. In the gloom of pre-dawn they face each other. He looks like a stranger, his hair still flattened and the heavy-rimmed glasses masking his eyes in the dim light.

'I'm sorry,' he says eventually.

She moistens her lips, tosses the hair away from her shoulders, then frowns. 'Why are you back so early?'

'They closed down for the night.'

Her eyes have adjusted to the lack of light and she can see the sooty streaks across his face, black and heavy. She didn't hear any sirens in the night but that doesn't mean anything. 'Was it a collapse?'

There's a long silence and she sees him again, the nineteen-year old with the blackened face suddenly haggard before he had smiled. He pulls himself out of something and shakes his head. 'No, one of the pumps broke down is all. Everybody got to go ho- leave early.'

She folds her arms around herself. 'Bet they'll dock your wages for that.'

'I have no doubt.' He takes off the glasses, runs a hand through his hair until it's standing up in every direction. He looks like the person she knows, or at least like the version she has come to know. 'I'm sorry if I disturbed you.'

'You didn't.' It isn't particularly cold but she feels chilly, rubs her arms. 'I couldn't sleep.'

She's aware, very aware, that her nightgown is short and thin and her robe hangs open; he's seen her like that before and she's always thought that it's her own business to look any way she wants to in her own house. And she's never been ashamed or afraid of her own body. But now, even in the obscuring shadows still unbroken by the steely near-light, she feels exposed.

His eyes stay on her face and she thinks he sees far more of her there than if he looked at her body.

'So many things that trouble you, Ava, I know; I have no wish to add to any of that.'

She's become so accustomed to his voice, to hearing his words in her head even when she's away from him that she isn't certain if he's actually spoken. He knows her, certainly knows enough to guess at the things haunt her midnight hours.

'I was going to get some-' She shrugs, not having got that far. 'Something. You want any?'

'Some something?' He smiles slightly. 'That would be nice.'

She flicks on the kitchen light and they both blink against the sudden glare. His gaze doesn't waver, doesn't change focus but he takes her in, all of her. He turns away.


	12. The Choice

_12. The Choice_

_**confidence**_ - _n._

_**1 **__the f__eeling__ or belief that one can rely on someone or something_

_**2 **__the telling of private matters or secrets with mutual trust_

After the men who aren't his friends have left Boyd stays out on the porch for a time.

She hears him when he unlocks the door, the whine of the screen door and then his careful tread. She plasters on a taut cheerfulness, makes coffee and offers him some, catching him before he makes the foot of the stairs and they perform an awkward ritual of stiff smiles and stilted sentences while she waits for the confidence that doesn't come.

He hadn't said yes, but he hadn't said no either.

They have supper together in the kitchen with the TV on and in between pretending to watch - a reality show, which she's sure he hates and she does too but it's something - they talk a bit about music and every now and then they even laugh.

And she waits for him to tell her but he doesn't.

There are no nightmares tonight, mainly because there is very little sleep. She feels groggy, light-headed the next morning when she's sitting on the porch and he heads out to work - out to the non-friends - and she calls him on it because she can't take it anymore.

The uncertainty, she thinks, more than anything.

She believes he wants to change and she wants to believe that he can but there is still doubt and sometimes she hates herself for it and sometimes she hates that he turns himself inside out over everything he was and everything he's done and still looks like he can never find any peace.

When he comes home that evening they sit in the kitchen again and they leave the TV on and they don't laugh.

He doesn't go to Audrey's before his shift anymore - or afterward, for that matter; for the next few days he spends more time in the house, as though he's saving it up, savouring it before it's taken away from him.

There's also the thought that if that happens it's being taken away from her as well but she doesn't let herself think about it like that, not quite, not yet.

There is a storm coming; she can feel it in every word, every look, everything around her is braced, holds its breath, and so does she. She remembers her mama telling her that a storm isn't always a bad thing. Their violence can be destructive but sometimes the things that are destroyed are all the things that need to go and what's left behind is fresh, clear, the chance for something new.

She holds onto that at the salon, keeps it in her mind when she runs the tap, water flowing through the thick suds of a client's dark hair until it's washed clean.

According to the ground-rules she's laid down even hint, a suspicion, of there being something that she doesn't like should be enough to throw him out; it's more than a hint but she still doesn't do it.

She thinks about that, too. A lot.

In the back-room she sits and smokes two cigarettes without even noticing what she's doing, one after the other, which is a problem because in the first place she's meant to be quitting and in the second she's not supposed to smoke in there. When Jodie catches her she's outraged, hands on hips, because they are meant to be quitting together. And she's not supposed to smoke in there.

Jodie suggests a drink after work and she turns it down in favour of going home where she can worry in peace.

When she does get home the kitchen is a disaster zone which is both annoying and surprising because whatever else Boyd may be he's tidy - _fastidious_, the word springs into her mind and she's certain he must have told it to her but she can't think when or why - and then she notices the message pinned to the fridge under one of the bright magnets Bowman always made fun of her over.

And she knows.

She knows when she dials the number that there's something; and when it goes to voicemail in the way cellphones do when someone's ended the call before it's even started she _knows_.

She'd known before she did it but she she'd done it anyway.

That's another thing to think about and she does, for a long time, while she sits on the stairs and waits for him to return. When he does it's earlier than she had expected and she wonders, briefly, in those seconds before it begins if she really would have sat there all night waiting for the sound of his truck and the soft rattle of his key in the lock.

His eyes are glassy, smoke behind a mirror, sparks and shadow warring with each other without finding an equilibrium.

It's like a confession, his steady voice so calm telling her everything, all of it, from start to finish; she marvels at his composure in the telling of it and at her own in hearing it.

But, after all, she had wanted his confidence and now she has it. And more. One more favour, one more choice for her to make and he places his freedom and his trust in her hands.

Over the last few months she's made more choices than she had in her life before then put together.

But when it comes to this, it isn't really a choice at all.


	13. The Money

_13. The Money_

At the Marshal's Office she had, briefly, seen Raylan.

Phones ringing, a hum of voices, people walking with a contained rush and then his slow stride towards her and a look on his face that said _I told you so_ but he didn't actually say the words. They had stood and looked at each other and she had remembered a time - not so long ago - when all she had wanted was to find shelter in his arms.

He didn't say what was written in his face but after a moment and his eyes had lost a little of their hardness he had said:

'Are you okay?'

'I'm fine.' Her answer had come a little too loudly. Across the wide space where Boyd had been standing with the FBI or ATF or whatever the hell they were, his head had raised and his eyes found hers and she had known that he would give up everything they had agreed on at the thought that something had upset her.

'I'm fine,' she had repeated, softer, looking past Raylan's shoulder.

When she had looked at him again, Raylan was frowning and had leant towards her a little, like this was a question that was so important that no-one else should hear it.

'Why haven't you thrown him out before now?'

'He has a good heart.'

His head had tilted back then, his eyes narrowing to slits and a look of amusement, condescension had marred his features. 'You're going to bet your life on the state of Boyd Crowder's heart?'

She had met the gaze, steel in her resolve. 'Seems to me you've done just that before now.' She thinks about the woods on her own account and the mine on his. 'Besides, he ain't never lied to me.'

He had stiffened then and she'd turned away before he could say anything else.

Now, back in her house, they sit across from each other at her kitchen table and stare at the money. A little over twenty-three-thousand, and it's just a pile of paper. It had been well after dawn when they'd finally left Lexington, coming closer to noon by the time she'd retrieved the holdall from her bedroom closet where she'd hidden it under a pile of shoes and a bolt of berry-red fabric.

She should really have gone straight into work but she's allowing herself the luxury of a day off; normally such a thought would be followed by one about the money she'll be losing but now there is this, this offering, a cushion against the usual fear.

She pours another shot of bourbon into their coffee - they've been up all night so it doesn't count as drinking in the morning; and it's breaking her no-liquor-in-the-house rule but it was already there, and they've broken a whole bunch of others anyhow.

'Damn,' she says, looking at the neatly-stacked green bills. Benjamin Franklin looks back and he looks slightly amused; she's always thought he'd have been a lecher and she thinks it now more than ever. Another mouthful of coffee and she feels the sweet burn against her tongue, the fuzzy haze of alcohol rising through her head. 'Y'know, there's a part of me that thinks: screw the mortgage, just take the money and run.'

He rouses himself, blinks, looks at her and one corner of his mouth turns up. 'Where would you run to, Ava?'

She catches a breath. 'I used to think about Costa Rica.' A wry smile. 'I had a list once.'

He doesn't ask why she talks about it in the past tense.

'Where would you go in this big old world, Boyd?'

There is a pause and she can see the torrent behind his eyes. He sighs. 'There are still so many places I ain't seen in the States.' His fingers play with the handle of his mug and she watches their careless, delicate precision. 'I had a buddy who used to talk about this place out in Jordan - Petra, this city carved out of the rocks. He loved it out there in the desert, all them flat plains. I couldn't take it but he loved it. We used to talk about it, though, going to Petra, see that old city.'

A pause.

'Why didn't you?'

His chest rises and is still and then falls. 'Well, he stepped on a landmine during a night patrol. He wasn't killed outright but he died the next day. I couldn't really see it after that.'

It's the first time she's ever heard him talk, even in passing, about Kuwait. She remembers when he came back, how thin he had been, his face hollow and haunted and _hunted_ and a gaze that never seemed to quite focus, like he was still seeing things long past.

'Why did you go out there?' she asks, quiet, something she's always wondered and now seems like the one time to ask. After a few long moments he says:

'It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.'

'And was it?'

More moments; he shakes his head slowly. 'I don't know.'

They sit, drink the coffee sweetened with sugar and bourbon and the choices that have bound them to this moment.

'Colorado,' he says suddenly.

'What?'

'I'd like to see Colorado. The mountains. I like mountains,' he adds, as though this explains everything.

She studies him, the seriousness of his expression and starts to laugh. Exhaustion, she tells herself, and tries to stop it but her shoulders keep shaking.

He doesn't seem offended by her amusement: he smiles. He has a nice smile and it would be nice, she thinks, to see it more often.

She thinks it would be nice if she smiled more often.

Ava scrubs at her eyes, feels the leaden weight in her limbs and decides she should get some sleep. The stairs seem far away and her room at the top of them even further; she forces her unwilling body to stand. Boyd remains sitting and he looks worse than she feels, for all sorts of reasons.

But out of all of it the thing that bothers her the most, the thing she kept thinking about back at the Marshal's Office, is the idea that part of him wanted to crawl into that hole and never come back out.

She stops beside his chair, raises a hand and it hovers in the air for a moment before she rests her fingertips lightly on his shoulder. His eyes move to the point of contact, then travel slowly up: along her hand, her wrist, following the line of her arm, the curve of her neck, up to her face.

There are a lot things she wants to say but, unlike him, she doesn't have all the right words, so she settles on the thing that feels the most important, the one thing she really needs to tell him. 'I ain't up on the morals of all this. I don't know if you did the right thing in the wrong way, or the wrong thing in the right way and, honestly, I don't know how much it matters. You saved that man's life, you saved my house, you got rid of the bad guys - that has to be worth something. And-' She tilts her head, looking down at him. 'And I guess I'm saying thanks.'

He stares up at her and it's like a kaleidoscope - all the same pieces but they shift and the picture is subtly, entirely different. His smile and his voice are soft. 'Well, you're very welcome, Ava.'


	14. The Rainstorm

_14. The Rainstorm_

The fabric is delicate and it takes a little time to get the tension on the thread just right so that it won't all snag. The colour isn't quite the same as in the magazine, more pink than red, but it has the same summer-fruit tone and she prefers it. Head bowed over the sewing machine, eyes focused on the material feeding across the plate and the needle's furious motion, she is content.

The rain had swept in in the early hours, cloud hanging so low it obscures the mountains, a mantle of grey enveloping the house.

It feels like they're the only two people left in the world.

The country music station plays soft - a mix of old favourites and newcomers - and now and then the rustle as a page is turned. A leaden-grey weekend in Harlan County and he's out of work and she had expected that he'd be out of the house, burying himself somewhere she'd rather not know about, but he hadn't and he isn't. They had taken breakfast together, reading sections of the slightly soggy newspaper the paperboy had flung onto her porch while they ate eggs and the cinnamon cured bacon he loves so much. Now she sits and sews and he reads and the rain drums hard against the roof.

She concentrates on her hands but it doesn't take all of her thoughts. She thinks about the night he had come to her, making his apologies without any real hope of forgiveness. That was the last time, she thinks, that he has mentioned Bowman; and she thinks about the times before that, when he had been there and he had seen the bruises on her face and he had said nothing and his eyes had been flat and opaque and unreadable.

He's apologised for what he didn't do and she isn't sure exactly what he could have done but in the middle of all of that there were times when there had been _something_, even if he doesn't know it or it doesn't fit with what is in his head.

They had been arguing, they were always arguing but she remembers this. It had been a day almost like this one- But no, she thinks, no it had been overcast but not raining. Humid, sticky and she had been longing for rain, something to relieve the pressure, but it never came. Maybe that had been the row. Because it was too hot, because it was too cloudy, just because. Bowman never really needed a reason.

She'd known the look in his eyes, seen the flexing of his hands at his sides and known what was coming next. Sometimes he would try to curb his temper but he never tried very hard and it never worked anyway. She had been determined to stand her ground, partly because there was always the slight hope - _stupid_, she'd think later - that he would hold back, and partly because running always made it worse. Then he'd get mad because she'd made him chase her. So she stood, chin up, waiting.

Tension crackling through the house, she hadn't heard anything else: not the truck pulling up, not the tread of boots on the porch steps, nothing until the screen-door opened and Boyd sauntered in like he owned the place.

'What the hell are you doing here?' Bowman, still belligerent, his fists balling and his face reddening, the flush creeping down his throat to the open V of his shirt like he knew he'd been caught out.

'Came over to watch the game.' Calm, unconcerned. 'You're going senile in your old age, brother - you should invest in some of that brain-training they keep advertising in all them infomercials.'

Sitting himself on the sofa with no invitation and he'd kept talking, then: 'Hey, Ava, what's a man got to do to get a cup of coffee out of you these days?'

She'd escaped to the kitchen, leant against one of the counters, hands gripping the edge, until her heart stopped hammering.

When the coffee was finally ready she didn't need to take it to them because Boyd came out to get it, planting himself in the middle of the room so that she had to keep moving around him and watching her, all of the time, with that unblinking relentless gaze that shredded her skin. He'd taken the mugs from her hands, fingers brushing hers for a little too long, standing a little too close, then gone again.

Voices from the living room, falling into the rhythms of the game they were watching.

Later, Bowman had come shuffling into the kitchen for beer, sheepish, pressing a kiss into the back of her neck while she did the dishes. Two bottles clinking together, he'd gone back out and she could hear again the cadences of Boyd's voice. And she'd been glad.

Lightening forks the sky, thunder following immediately after it, rattling the window-panes in their frames. The clouds have blackened and the light on the sewing machine isn't enough anymore; she flicks the desk-lamp on and there's a faint answering _click_ from behind her and another pool of light. She glances over her shoulder.

He looks at home, she thinks, here in her house, book angled under the lamp, long legs stretched out on the rug. At home, content.

And she's glad.


	15. The Suit

_15. The Suit_

_**suit** n.&v._

_-n. **1** a set of outer clothes of matching material_

_-v. tr. **1** go well with (a person's figure, features, character)_

A limousine in Harlan County is not a usual occurrence and it most definitely is not something that Ava has ever seen pulling up outside of her house. The only people with that sort of money are the big shots at the mining company and-

_Oh God._

Because everything official she connects with bad news and he's working for the company again and she's not sure how and there's a big black shiny car and she feels it, the roil in the pit of her stomach, and _ohGodohGodohGodohGod-_

The figure that gets out of the limousine is familiar by its walk, a silhouette against the flare of the headlights. They light up the stretch of ground rolling away from her house, sending the rabbits that had been feeding in the cool night air into a confused frenzy, running around each other before stopping, freezing in the white glare. The limousine turns, tyres crunching the rough covering of dirt and stone, passes into the night and he walks up the steps onto the porch, still that same way of moving, the quiet control, ever since she's known him.

She sags against the door-frame, relief and fury buckling her legs. He has no right to scare her like that, none at all and only after that does she think that, really, she has no right to be afraid and mad for him, at him. She pulls herself up.

It's a nice suit, she thinks, when she looks at him properly, and he should look good in it but somehow it doesn't quite work. He seems ... diminished. Shoulders hunched. It hangs on him like it belongs to somebody else.

'I ain't never seen a car so big in Harlan before,' she says when he reaches the top of the porch steps. 'Don't think I've ever seen one that big anywhere. I thought the President himself was coming to visit me.'

He remains just beyond the circle of light from the porch-lamp. 'It is a sight.'

Ava folds her arms, her weight settling on one jutting hip. He is restless and it courses off him, spiking on the night air. She tosses the hair away from her shoulders. 'Riding around all day in a big old limousine... I could do that for a job. Some girls have all the luck.'

'I cannot imagine that Ms Carol Johnson would agree to anything she deemed less befitting.'

Less befitting what? she wonders but keeps the smile in place. Of all the things he is, or has been, and in all the ways she has thought of him, she has never thought him bad-tempered. This is new. It feels like if he twists the wrong way, or any way, he'll break.

For her he has always smiled, or at least - for the most part, anyway - found a gentleness. She relies on that. Maybe that's why, she thinks - _later_ - that she tries to tease him out of this humour.

'Maybe you'll be like one of those security consultant, y'know, like on all those TV shows.'

His head tilts back and there is a sort of smile around his lips: something wry and bitter and defeated and he looks too tired, tired right down to the bone, to do anything about any of it. 'Well, Ava, it is true that Ms Johnson has hired me because of my past.'

If she had not become so attuned to the cadences of his speech she would have missed that slight emphasis.

_Because _of, not _in spite _of.

He walks past her into the house and she decides that she hates Carol Johnson.

She takes a few moments out on the porch, taking in the air deep until its cool sweetness flows through her like a current, then she follows him into the house.

He's taken off the necktie and he stands, winding it, a noose tight around his fingers. She thinks longingly of the bottle of bourbon in the cupboard and the glorious numbing prickle against her lips, sliding down her throat, spreading through until everything is blotted out, or at least softened by a warm haze that takes the edge off the unbearable. But she's keeping it for emergencies, and there will be emergencies, she knows, and they aren't really there with this, not quite. He puts the roll of dark fabric down on the table and it unspools slightly, a dull gleam under the lamplight.

She wishes he'd taken more of their money, enough so that he wouldn't have to go back there, enough so that they could close the door on the world and let it all just slide by.

_They_.

The word hammers in her head and she tries to ignore it.

Without the tie but with the shirt collar still buttoned up he seems more himself again, shoulders loosened, straightening, the still centre of the thing she's trying to pretend she doesn't carry around with her all of the time. He takes in a breath and it shakes through him; when he turns and finds her watchful eyes there is a moment where nothing happens and then he pulls up a smile, just for her.


	16. The Creek

_16. The Creek_

Ava balances the flashlight on the knees, holding the beam steady on the fuse-box while he works, fingers deft with the wires and little bits of burnt-out plastic and metal. When the lights had gone out with a hissing pop that had set her teeth on edge she had started, dropped a glass, felt the splash of water and ice against her legs. For a moment she had stood while darkness as thick and heavy as molasses had enveloped the house. She had never been afraid of the dark, only of the things that could happen in it, but when she heard him calling her she had tried to speak, found her mouth dry, finally managed to find a thin high semblance of her voice to tell him she was all right and when she had crunched across the kitchen floor, glass splinters embedding themselves into the soles of her house-slippers, she had also realised she was shaking.

Now, down in the basement with its dank smell that catches at the back of her throat, she's been given the task of holding the light while he mends the fuses. With the first look at the tangle of wires he had sighed, shaken his head, muttered something under his breath.

She hates it down here. Even if it got given one of those makeovers - a _conversion_ - that they always have in magazines and on the TV, she would still hate it, still be able to smell its stench of rancid water and decay. She shivers and inches forward just enough that she can feel the warmth rising from the curve of his back.

It's a humid night, although not particularly hot, cool clammy weather that she also hates, but anything is preferable to this and she looks forward to being back out in the open.

They had driven down to the creek one night, she remembers, her and Bowman and Boyd and the girl he had been seeing at the time - Jenny? Janey? Jaime? Something like that. A tiny thing, big eyes and a cloud of hair around her heart-shaped face. She remembers envying her that particular brand of dark, delicate beauty.

They had played music through the car stereo, drunk the beer they'd brought with them and watched the fireflies skim across the water.

Bowman had spent most of the time trying to make Jenny - she'll settle on calling her that - laugh and she had complied, a mellow husky sound that swooped and dipped on the night air. But her eyes always slipped sideways, watching Boyd from under her lashes and he watched the scene with evident amusement, contributing the occasional comment that subtly undermined his brother without Bowman even noticing it.

He was still thin after Kuwait, too thin, skin stretched over the sharp lines of his cheekbones, sunken in the hollows at his temples; but the dullness in his eyes had been replaced by a kind of fever.

'Ava.'

She starts, swinging up the flashlight she has let sag and the beam catches him full in the face, the light bouncing off his glasses. He shields his eyes with one hand, moves the flashlight with the other.

'I need you to hold it steady.' Patient, the merest whisper of reproach at the edges.

'Sorry.' She holds it firm.

The white dazzle off his lenses has caused dancing lights like sunspots before her eyes, a private light-show every time she blinks.

They had eventually gone swimming, Bowman challenging everyone to a race and striking out across the water before anyone else had a chance to set a toe in.

'He's real competitive, ain't he?' Jenny, tying her hair back, exposing the perfect long lines of her neck.

'Bowman?' She shrugged. 'I guess. He always has to win.' Boyd had nearly caught him up, though, she noticed, even with a late start; he didn't seem as interested in winning as in stopping Bowman from reaching the far bank. Bowman, she thought indulgently, against the shouts and whoops of laughter, wouldn't like that at all.

The water felt blissfully cool, silken, after the heat of the day and the patches on her shoulders where she'd caught too much sun. She floated, limbs languid, fingers of water through her hair. When she was a kid she'd play at being a mermaid, sliding through the water until the skin on her fingers and toes was bleached white and wrinkled and her hair smelt almost permanently of the cool depths of the creek. Her mama despaired of her - _'No man wants a girl who smells like a fish'_ - but she didn't care.

She watched the stars overhead and she drifted, sounds fading in and out as the water lapped at her ears. Then covered her face and she choked, took in more water, tried to right herself and found a tangle of reeds, weeds, _something_, wrapping around her ankle. Water in her mouth, in her eyes, in her ears; she was flailing and moving down and not up. The water didn't smell fresh anymore, it was brackish and decaying and _so so dark_ and she didn't want to die like that, dragged down into the blackness.

Arms around her waist pulled at her, hard, her head snapping back and air against her face. Her breath came in choking whoops, still not getting in enough air. Dragged through the water, pushed up onto the bank, then Boyd hit her, hard, on the back and water dribbled out of her mouth. She coughed hopelessly against him and he pushed the wet hair away from her face, fingers following the curve of her cheek. He rubbed her back where he had hit her, comforting circles that followed the rhythm of her slowing breathing. Wet skin still darkened from the desert sun gleamed bronze and his face close to hers was carved in desperate lines. Even when the worst of her shaking had stopped he still held her and when she felt his lips press against her right temple she didn't ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. She closed her eyes and wondered if that was still her heart she could hear hammering, or his.

At the sound of other voices, he released her. Bowman was all crooning concern, making a great show of making a fuss of her _(show is what it was, she had plenty of time later to find that out)_. Jenny had stood apart, her dark hair a sleek rope, rivulets running down her body and her eyes wide and black and furious.

The lights come on, power surging through the house with an audible rush.

'Do you remember we went down to the creek one time? There were four of us.'

'I remember,' he says after a moment. He fits the cover back over the fuse-box, wipes it down like he's removing his fingerprints, turns to her and switches off the flashlight she's still holding. 'Night swimming can be mighty dangerous.'


	17. The Meeting

_17. The Meeting_

There's always been something of the showman about Boyd. He knows what words to use and how to use them. Raylan had spoken well, but there's an extra something when Boyd stands, a charge in the air, an expectancy.

Mainly, she thinks, because no-one sitting there can guess at what he's going to say before he starts - and she wonders if even he knows.

He likes an audience and he woos them with his show of honesty, filling the room with it.

The things is that even now, after all the years she's known him and the months they've been under the same roof, it's times like this when she still can't tell if he means what he says or if he just likes the performance of it. It can go either way, she decides. Maybe in the end it comes down to what he actually wants out of it and he must want something out of this and that woman.

The redhead is prettier than Ava had imagined. More imposing, statuesque. Definitely prettier. She wonders if Boyd thinks so and _she doesn't care if he does._

The long layers of her dark auburn hair, Ava notes with petty satisfaction, haven't been cut quite as expertly as the rest of her appearance of expense would suggest.

When Boyd introduces them, before it all starts, Carol Johnson is polite and forcibly pleasant and noticeably patronising. There's a sly, amused smile when Boyd calls Ava his sister-in-law - _former sister-in-law, he makes the immediate correction_ - and her palms itch to slap her. Her voice slows when she talks to Ava, as though she's talking to a child or a simpleton. She uses the same tone to Boyd and Ava realises, a sudden shock, that the woman thinks he's stupid. She probably thinks they're all dumb rednecks who can't spell 'cat' but Carol Johnson has spent time with Boyd, talked to him and she still can't see past what she's read in his file.

Not as smart as she thinks she is, Ava thinks with another spear of satisfaction, this one transcending into a sense of triumph. She sits back and enjoys the show, enjoys her own private knowledge of the thing that Carol Johnson, with all of her education and expensive clothes, doesn't know: that whatever she thinks she'll get out of Boyd, in the end he'll get far more out of her.

And she does enjoy it and the meeting goes well and then there's Mags Bennet.

After Bowman and Bo and all the things that have happened in the past year, and all the years before that, there isn't really anyone that Ava is afraid of anymore; but then there's Mags Bennet.

Mags is a strong woman, she's had to be, she's made her own way in life and normally Ava would find that admirable but the raw truth is that the woman is terrifying. She walks with the low roll of a street-brawler, shoulders shoved forward aggressively, and Ava shrinks, involuntary and instinctive, when Mags walks past her.

She concentrates, instead, on Boyd and the back of his head. A few rows ahead of her and partially obscured, but she can see the tufts of dark hair and the neat curve of one ear close against his head. The way he turns, suddenly, slightly, at something Mags has said, listening closer.

And she listens then, trying to hear what he has heard but the moment has passed, so she goes back to watching him, reading him.

There was a spark earlier, when he'd been talking. Light flaring behind his eyes, still burning when he had finished talking and taken his seat alongside everyone else. It isn't because of the speech he had made, it isn't - she _knows_ - because of Carol Johnson and her long legs and insincere smile, it's something that started before that.

There isn't a moment to pinpoint, no one precise thing upon which to hang this change but she remembers the neat bundles of money on the kitchen table and her hand - _no, her fingertips, because really touching him had been too frightening but not for the reasons anyone else would have thought_ - and the way he had looked then, and way he had looked at her then and maybe through the fug of caffeine and alcohol and lack of sleep she hadn't recognised what she had seen. Had not seen the sudden dance of fire behind his eyes.

It's vanity to think that she is the cause. But she had set herself the task of building him up again and she hadn't given much thought to what would happen after that. When he was whole again, when he wouldn't need her anymore-

She sucks in a breath, rigid against the sudden lancing pain.

The meeting has become white noise and she focuses on it again, catches the words of Mags' speech without really getting the meaning - she still isn't listening enough for that - and she notices that Carol Johnson's face is tight, ominous and she almost feels sorry for her. Almost.

When the sound that's like gunfire reverberates around the hall she freezes, like everyone else, and then, like everyone else, she moves, throwing herself forward and sheltering, instinctively, behind the chair in front of her. Everything else is a blur of panic and shouts and rushing bodies.

At the front of the hall Boyd stands, still, caught between going up to the stage where the redhead is crouching behind the podium with Raylan beside her and something that's keeping him where he is, his body twisted around, looking back into the hall. His eyes find her and she sees the set of his shoulders lower, relax, the wildfire of his gaze recede to something controllable.

She's okay. Everything is okay and she nods, one slight movement of her head, releasing him from the agony of indecision.

He joins Raylan, one either side of the woman who's made herself so small Ava can't see her anymore. They are almost side-by-side but the physical division is comical in its obviousness. They crouch, both with restless eyes wandering around the now near-empty hall but Boyd - _vanity, vanity, all is vanity, but her chin lifts a little in response and she smiles_ - Boyd's gaze keeps coming back to her.


	18. The Stairs

_18. The Stairs_

Her hands shake as she gets the ice out of the tray. Fury, not fear. How dare they come into her house, that limping weasel Dickie Bennett- _Goddamn him_ -and the dumb-ass rabid dog of a brother. She should have shot them, both of them, not just whatever the hell it was had been in the duffel bag. She had the right, protecting herself and Boyd against two men who had invaded her home. She would have been - she grimaces, hating the word - _justified_.

After they had gone she knelt beside him. Bruises already flowering across his cheek and jawbone, the split lip oozing. God knows what other damage there was that she couldn't see. _Then_ she had felt fear and when he raised a hand, groping blindly, she had taken it, holding on tight as much for her sake as for his. His fingers, warm and calloused, had closed around hers.

She had tried to help him up but he shrugged her off, feebly, with the same laboured breathing and the waxy whiteness to his face she remembered from that night when she'd first brought him here. She left him on the floor and every caught breath and faint grunt of pain seemed to echo, unnaturally loud.

The ice sticks in the tray and she twists the piece of plastic savagely until the frozen cubes pop out, clattering against the metal draining board. And she is suddenly, unreasonably, furious at the unfairness of the fact that going straight will most likely get him killed. Knowing him, he'll probably say that this is irony.

She scoops up handfuls of ice, the coldness a shock, sticking to her skin, and wraps them in a cloth.

When she goes back out he has peeled himself off the floor and made it as far as the stairs. And just like that night all those months ago he seems smaller somehow, despite his height, his frame doesn't looks so much lean as fragile. Her hands don't shake when she presses the ice-pack to his face but maybe there is still anger in her face, maybe that is what he sees because he apologises and then he apologises again.

Or maybe he just assumes that she's mad and that if she is it will be with him.

If she hears him say that he's sorry, she thinks, just one more time, over anything, she is going to scream.

The bones of his face are hard, fine, defined, and his breath is warm against her fingers. There are tiny flecks in his eyes, slivers of gold, and she thinks of sunlight filtering through trees as summer turns to fall.

They talk a little about what's happened, about what's happening and then suddenly it hangs in the air, that word.

_Us._

Such a small thing. Two letters, one syllable. But it is full and heavy and heady. She repeats it, the shape of it lingering in her mouth

He doesn't apologise, not this time, but she can see it in his face, along with a certain helplessness because to him there has always been an _us_ and lately he's been trying to hide it, just when she-

She goes back into the kitchen and retrieves the bottle of bourbon from the the back of the cupboard. One glass. Her hands are shaking again and she takes a few moments, stands at the sink and gazes sightlessly out of the window. It's all black until the edge of the mountains silhouette themselves against the only-slightly paler sky. Ragged strips of cloud drag, weary, across the night. It's a new moon and the shadows are as deep and dark as ink. She shivers, pulls the curtains across and goes back, again, to where he's still sitting.

She sits on the next stair down from his, pours some liquor into a glass and sets the bottle between them.

'Here.' He looks at her, at the glass, at her. 'Take it,' she says, a bite of impatience in her voice.

He takes the glass, takes some of the bourbon and frowns slightly. 'I think you may have got to the heart of the matter, Ava.'

She's fairly certain that he isn't talking about the delights of Wild Turkey; she raises her chin and her eyebrows inquisitively.

'Mags,' he clarifies, rolling the glass between his hands. The ice in the make-shift pack is slowly melting, leaking out onto the wood where he's left it. He folds back the cloth, picks up a few cubes and drops them into the bourbon. Takes a sip. He rests his head against the wall and blinks, slowly. 'Buying up them properties to keep the creeks and the hollers safe... I can't see her being that altruistic.'

'Being what?'

He lifts his head, still frowning, then smiles slightly. He gives her the glass and she takes a sip.

'Altruistic' -he lingers over the word- 'it means doing something for someone else without wanting anything in return.'

'Oh.' She laughs, sort of, wryly, takes another sip and hands the glass over. 'That don't sound like Mags.'

The stairs are hard and the edge bites into her thigh. She shifts, uncomfortable, the wood squeaking under her and she thinks that it's becoming a habit, their sitting like this, and they really should find somewhere better for the late-night confessional.

But there is something intimate about it, something comforting despite the physical discomfort, something that is theirs.

_They. Them. Theirs._

_Us._

There's no getting away from those words and maybe that's why he hadn't apologised this time. Maybe he'd seen the acceptance of it in her face, understands that she's thought it long before he had ever said it.

'What are you going to do?' she asks. _About what?_ she thinks.

'I don't know.'

_You're not the only one._

He rests the back of his head against the wall again, his eyes closing.

'You should get some sleep,' she says. Those beatings will take it out of you, she knows but doesn't say it because she doesn't want that cycle of self-recrimination starting up once more.

A corner of his mouth turns up and then his eyes open. 'I guess.' He starts to move and winces, his face tightening.

'You could have broken ribs.'

'I'm fine.'

'Just let me see-'

It happens fast. Her hand flat, fingers splayed against his ribcage and he sucks in a breath and grabs her wrist and-

'Ava.' Eyes suddenly wide and wild.

_Ava, stop? Or: Ava, don't stop?_

His grip is hard and almost painful but not quite and they stare at each other.

She has never been afraid of him, not really. It isn't fear that's making the blood pound through her ears.

It isn't pain that's made him stop her from touching him, except she is still touching him, her hand still feeling the ridges of bone and the heat from his skin through his shirt.

His lips would hold the salty tang of blood and be sweet and smoky from the bourbon.

He pulls her hand away, peels his fingers from her wrist one by one. 'I'm fine,' he says again, soft, while fire banks down behind his eyes.

She nods, dumb, bites the inside of her lower lip, tosses the hair away from her face. 'Well, good-night then.'

He pulls himself up and his tread on the stairs is heavier than usual. She collects the glass, drains it, scoops up the bottle and the sodden cloth with its mess of soft ice and takes it through to the kitchen, dumps it all in the sink.

She opens the curtains again. The night is still black as tar but the cloud has lifted and the sky is prickled with stars. After all of these years they have become friends but she knows, with the same certainty that she knows the moon will wax fat and wane and wax again, that they won't stay at just that.


	19. The Game

_19. The Game_

It had been one of Bowman's last games, not that they had known it at the time. He was still talked about as the high-school football star although he had missed out on the college scholarship, but no-one really talked about that except behind closed doors because he was still Bo Crowder's son.

They played on the old high-school ground, a show game, a charity game for the miners and their families who didn't qualify for aid and allowances and suchlike. It was strange to be back there, on the same old bleachers with the same old paint flaking off.

She'd always cheered him on at the high-school games; not as part of a squad, though they'd asked her plenty of times but she'd never been the cheerleader type, even if she did look the part. The prettiest girl in the school, in Harlan, and he was the handsome running back with the cute smile.

Later on she'd think about the obviousness of it all, the cliché; and she'd cry with laughter. Or maybe just cry. So young, she had been so, so young.

But at the game, at _that_ game, she sat up in the bleachers and she felt proud.

It was crowded, but not so crowded that Boyd needed to sit as close to her as he did. Not quite touching but almost but he was _there_ and she knew it, felt it, every second. She didn't move away, didn't take the few inches of space to her right that would have taken her just beyond that _almost _state because that would have been an admission, an acknowledgement of him. If she ignored it, if it looked as though she didn't even notice him then maybe it would stop, he would stop.

She sat forward until he was out of her eye-line, focused on the figures on the field but she was aware, still, of his eyes on her. It was a hot day but it wasn't the heat that raised the prickle of sweat on her skin, that rolled the beads down the back of her neck and the hollow of her spine.

When she would glance back he was always watching the game, following Bowman's steam-roller progress across the field.

Anyone looking at them would have just seen Boyd Crowder sitting next to his sister-in-law, both of them supporting his brother, her husband.

And there was nothing she could say because he had never really done anything, but she _knew_ because it was there in every word and look and gesture.

At the end of the first half the teams went into their huddles, getting their pep talks, or game strategy, or _whatever_ from the coaches and the cheerleaders poured onto the pitch in their cheap costumes and bright smiles and then, after the tight knot of players broke apart in a blood-pounding whoop, Bowman jogged to the edge of the field, pulling off his helmet and grinning up at her, the pads making his shoulders look even wider, stronger, more solid than usual.

It was the perfect excuse- _not that she needed one_ -to move, one that wasn't about _him_ but was about _her_ and her life in which he had no part except tangentially because he was her husband's brother.

She stood and felt the thin cotton dress cleave to her body, picked her way down the stands and met Bowman at the white line drawn against the grass. He smiled at her and kissed her but there was an edge to the smile, a look in his eyes, that she had seen before but never directed at her, not quite, not that bad.

And still she could feel the other pair of eyes watching her from high up in the bleachers.

She had thought, then, that she was running from the danger, that the person she was going to would be her safety.

He kissed her for luck but it wasn't enough: the game had not gone well for Bowman's team and after the break it went worse. They lost and Bowman seemed to take that very personally, as though this defeat was aimed at him, another humiliation designed to ruin him and his dreams and his reputation, along with the indignity of taking a job at the mine, just until his football ambitions worked out.

And there was that look in his eyes and it made him someone she didn't know, except that she did because it had always been there, just beneath the surface, and she had always overlooked it and then that night, when they'd got home-

That had been the first time.

She kicks away the covers, sits on the edge of the bed and her fingers twist into the sheets.

She remembers the game and she remembers Bowman's fist in her face, the shock of it, the explosive pain, but she doesn't really remember the in-between time. That had been the first time but it hadn't, no matter what he had said, been the last time. It had never been the last time, until she had ended it.

Her throat is scratchy and she thinks about going down to the kitchen and a tall glass of ice and water but she hasn't refilled the tray and she doesn't really feel like going all the way down there anyway. She goes out onto the landing and the door of the spare room is edged with light.

She drinks from the bathroom tap, splashes cold water against her face, looks at herself in the mirror and the woman she sees is determined and certain and she wonders how _she_ can look like that when she doesn't feel like that. Not quite.

Back on the landing and the light still shows under his door. Maybe he's reading one of his interminable books, or maybe he's keeping watch in case the Bennet boys decide to pay another visit, or maybe- she stares at the lines of light -maybe the beating was worse than either of them had thought. Maybe it's serious and he's suffering and ill and hurting and unable to call out and needing her; and it would be the right thing to make sure, to open his door, to see-

The light goes off.

She stands for a while, blinking against the increased darkness, then goes back into her room.

The next morning, when he's fizzing with energy, and he tells her to put on something pretty, she puts on the berry-red dress she's been working on and has finally finished. It's even better than she had hoped for and she's proud of it. And when she asks him if it's pretty enough she stands, and turns, and shows it off under his gaze. There's a twitch in the fingers in the hand he keeps at his side, a longing to reach out for something that he dare not allow himself. And for once he has no words.


	20. The Bar

_20. The Bar_

_**partner** n.&v._

_-n. **1** a person who shares or takes part with another or others, with shared risks and profits_

_-n. **2** a companion in dancing_

'You may not be able to sing, Boyd, but you sure as hell can dance.'

The truck follows the twisting tracks down through the hollers, putting distance between them and that back-woods nightmare world that the Bennetts call home. The late sun slants low across the sky, a burnished copper that touches the edges of clouds with the pink and gold-gilt of a renaissance painting.

'My mama taught me,' he says.

She pictures it, his grandmother singing and his mama teaching him the steps to the song and it's not the scene that she ever would have imagined in the Crowder household. So much that she still doesn't know, that maybe she never will.

The tension released on her nerves, she feels relaxed and her eyes drift closed.

'Bowman had two left feet.' It's out before she realises it, that name hanging in the air and she stiffens, stares ahead at the road. The response is a light breath of laughter.

'Yes, he did.'

And there it is. She's said it and the sky has not fallen in. They are still who they are. Bowman will always be there but he doesn't matter any more and she can live her life. She settles back against the seat, feeling the soft leather shift and give under her, smoothes the folds of her dress down over her thighs. 'It's a long time since I've been dancing.'

On the wheel his hands are loose but sure, steering them through the bends with an unconcerned certainty that comes from familiarity, not something designed to impress. His eyes slip sideways.

'Anytime you want to go dancing, Ava, I would be more than happy to accommodate you in that.'

'Right now?' It's a challenge and she mimics the intonation from earlier. It sounds ridiculous and in a way it _is_ ridiculous, but she's never known any man to get up and dance just because he's happy.

He had laughed. He still laughs and _she_ laughs and she wants to hold onto this for a little while longer.

The truck eases around a curve, picks up speed as they pull out of it.

'Right now. Anything you want.'

'Then let's go dancing.'

They drive to a place in Corbin, little more than a roadhouse but the music is good and the atmosphere friendly.

After the Bennetts' place, anywhere would feel friendly.

They slide into one of the booths, facing each other; she moistens a finger, running it around the rim of her glass until it sings.

'What were you going to call your rock band?' she asks.

He looks surprised, just a little, and she wonders if it's because she's asked or because she remembers that conversation. The he smiles, a slow spread across his face.

'I never really got that far.'

She tilts her head. 'You should think about it - you never know what might happen.' Earlier she had been in need of a stiff drink, and then maybe another one after that. Now the liquor slides down with its pleasant familiar warmth and one sip is enough. 'I could be the backing singer.'

'I didn't know you could sing.'

She laughs. 'I can't.'

His head lowers and his shoulders shake slightly, silent laughter. When he looks up at her again his eyes are warm. 'Well, Ava, I think that our target audience would be what's known as a niche market.'

'You mean folks who like bad singing? Hell, there's plenty of them about - you heard most of the stuff that's on the radio these days?'

'Now, you can't hold that against them, they just weren't raised right.'

'To good music.' She raises her glasses. He answers with his and a note rings out between them.'

'You know, I never could figure why we do that,' she says, frowning at the glass.

'Do what?'

'Do _that, _chink them together.'

He leans back. 'It's to bring all the senses together. You can touch the glass, you can see it, you can smell and taste the liquor - only thing that's left out is hearing.'

'I like that.' She smiles. 'It even makes sense.'

His eyebrows raise, mock serious: 'Are we dancing or not?'

They spin through the fast numbers until she's breathless. She enjoys this, enjoys the respectful circle of his arm around her waist and the work-roughened hand that holds hers.

When the tempo slows there is a moment of uncertainty - strange, she thinks that after everything he's the one who seems so unsure - and his grip on her loosens; but she keeps hold and is already swaying in time to the music.

They dance. Slow, shuffling steps that take them in a lazy spiral around the floor. She rests her cheek on his shoulder. Most people would probably say that in herself she's a happy person and she tries, has always tried, to be but she's always found happiness to be a fragile thing. Now she feels it, a strong core of it running through her.

He holds her a little closer, his hand resting just beneath her ribcage, fingers steady against the ridge of bone.

If he were to kiss her now, she wouldn't mind. She thinks about his lips against hers, about the way he would look at her; she thinks about him saying her name in that way he has and about his hand leaving the safety of her waist and actually touching her. Going home together and him not sleeping in the room that has become his. She wouldn't mind, not any of it.

But he doesn't kiss her, not then, and not the next day or any that follow, not even when he leaves her.


	21. The Book

_21. The Book_

_'I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world'_

One of the strips of neon tubing is slowly dying, intermittent bursts of light and an angry buzzing like a hornet wired on caffeine. Even with her back to it she can see it flickering: reflected in the mirror; out of the corner of her eye.

And then there's the damn buzzing.

It drives her crazy, all of it, and in the end she can't take it anymore, drags her chair across, stands on it-

Not safe, the rational part of her thinks, _screams_, as the seat swivels and she twists precariously. She yanks the tube out of the fixture so hard it cracks.

A savage triumph. She climbs back down, tossing her hair out of her eyes and Jodie stares at her, despairing of her.

'What the hell?'

Ava ignores her, goes through the back-room, goes outside, dumps the broken neon-tube, lights a cigarette and drags the smoke in so fast and so deep that it hurts, burns.

Small-talk washes over her, the constant inane repetition of holiday plans and fights with boyfriends and husbands that might be straying and her nerves jangle with it. She keeps losing her grip on her scissors and it's a wonder that her clients don't end up bald or with a severed artery. Or both.

Jodie keeps throwing her worried looks and she snipes in response and when she's satisfied herself that she's had as miserable a day as is possible, she goes home.

She's not sure she really wants to go. She doesn't want the emptiness she knows will be there but maybe, _maybe_-

No.

He won't have changed his mind. She knows that.

And he's made a point of doing everything she's asked of him and she had told him to go.

She still can't quite believe that he did.

Hard-headed, her mama used to call her, and it was a kind of stubborness, that refusal to take back a word that she had said to him - although, almost every action she has taken, every decision she has made has done precisely that.

Actions are meant to speak louder than words, but then words mean so much to him.

In the house the silence is like thunder. It rolls around the rooms, low and heavy. Her footsteps echo, the sound of her own breathing loud. At the top of the stairs she hesitates, then makes the turn and pushes open the door of his- Of the spare room.

It's like he was never there, except that it's tidier than it was before. And the window is fully open, the curtain fluttering in the breeze that doesn't make it through the air thickened by silence.

She sits on the packing case and stares at nothing.

After she and Raylan had split-

She laughs to, _at_, herself. It makes it sound like they'd actually had a relationship, a proper one.

But _after_ she had been too mad at Raylan to miss him. Then she was too busy being taken hostage and then after that worrying about Boyd and herself and that had taken up all of her time. She had had other things to think about, been exhausted by trying to put them both of them back together, so by the time Raylan turned up again, she had never really missed him at all.

There hadn't been the sickening hole somewhere above her stomach and the listlessness and the way everything seemed bleached of colour.

She pushes herself up from the packing case.

There's a scent, light, aftershave and something behind that, something she recognises from when she laid her head on his shoulder and breathed him in.

She picks up the book he's left behind on the neatly folded blanket. Old, the cover worn, some of the pages stained and starting to come away from the spine. Was it something he'd always had, she wonders, or just picked up along the way? Some passages are underlined and she wonders, again, if that was his hand. Has he left it for her, some message between its covers?

She leafs through it, her eyes resting on a few lines. They blur. She blinks hard, snaps it shut.

She isn't going to read the damn book. If there's something he wants to tell her he can say it to her face.

She carries it through and puts it on her bedside table.

But she will not, _will not_, read it.


	22. The Kiss

_22. The Kiss_

She's never really been loved.

She knows this, has known it for a long time, and thinks about it now while she watches Boyd as he keeps watch.

Bowman had seen her as his prize, treated her as a possession and used her as a punch-bag. Raylan had liked her well enough to sleep with her but not enough to stay with her.

Next time, she has promised herself, next time she will find a good man.

Her criteria aren't bound by laws or morals, they are defined by the things that are important to her. A good man will not beat her or deceive her or abandon her. A good man will love her, truly love her, and only her. And he might stand outside of her house, watching the place where he thinks she is, without wanting anything from her.

She stands in the shadows for a time, watching him, not surprised to find him there.

He stares at the house with the fixation most men reserve for something sacred. And she waits for the moment when he will work himself up to going to the door until she realises that he isn't going to.

He is a good man, and he is hers.

When she steps out and calls him by name he turns and looks at her and for a second she thinks that he will bolt. She doesn't ask how long he would have stood there because she already knows. They had reached the point, long ago, where she knows all she needs to. No fairy-tales, no impossible dreams, but a knight in tarnished armour offering his devotion from afar.

And in the end she's the one who takes the final steps, who kisses him, her hands light against his face.

They hold each other for a long time; he says her name, sending it up to the stars that bear witness to this, to them.

_Us_.

She tilts her head back, re-captures his lips and this time his hand twists into the roots of her hair and his breath in her mouth is warm and sweet. He feels solid, here in her arms, and _right_.

Solid, anchored, and unmoving when she tries to pull him towards the house.

'Ava...' He sighs, traces the line of her cheek with his finger. 'That's not why I came.'

'But it's what you've got. Like it or not,' she adds, defiant, and he smiles then.

He is hers, and she is his.


	23. The Lovers

_23. The Lovers_

His body is all long lean limbs and hard planes against hers.

When they had got back inside the house and he had locked the door against whatever else the night could bring she had thought that this would be another long conversation but when he turned and looked at her, at every part of her, drinking her in with a reverence and a want that sent a flush along her skin she had known that there would be few words. Later, yes, on both sides, but not now.

Actions, it seemed, did mattered to him after all.

Her fingers were clumsy with the buttons on her jacket; she felt rather than heard him approach her, dropped her hands to her sides as he worked the buttons through the bindings. Like hers, there was a tremor to them.

She remembered the night at the creek and the way his wet skin had glistened in the moonlight; she remembered the surge of relief when he crept into that shack to rescue her; she remembered evenings spent out on the porch and the mornings at breakfast and sharing the paper and making him smile with silly stories she saved up from the salon and practised and embellished while she drove home from work. She remembered lying awake and fearing for him, longing for him. She put her hands over his and when he looked up there was fire in eyes.

Somehow they had made it up the stairs.

And now this.

His hands on her body are the way she had imagined them: warm and heavy and gentle and _everywhere_. He reads her with the same intensity he does his books, his fingers following her lines. Nerve-endings ignite under his touch, sending licks of flame across her skin. Once she had dreaded the way he would look at her, would shrink from his gaze. Now she covets it, revels in it. And revels in him, the feeling of him.

She runs her hands up his arms, across his shoulders, his chest. Feels the slide of muscle under taut skin, sleek beneath her caress. The wild, rough satin of his hair and the hard bone of cheek and jaw. She drags her teeth across the cords of his neck, feeds on the throbbing pulse.

And all the time his hands and his mouth map her body. His fingers trace lazy figures against her inner-thigh and his teeth-

She gasps, back arching-

-his teeth graze her breast, scraping the skin.

The tantalising delicacy of his touch still just beyond where she craves it the most. She pulls his head back up to hers, claims his mouth again, catches his lip between her teeth and tastes there that smoky sweetness.

_Mine_, she thinks, fiercely possessive, folds herself around him and the word hammers in her head, the same rhythm as his breath against her neck. She cradles his body between her legs, pushing herself up against him, pulling him closer.

When he slides into her, finally, it's like everything else in this strange dance they have performed around each other: slow, drawn-out, loaded with meaning. She bites her lip and her eyes flicker closed and she _feels_ him, deep, during this unending moment.

His fingers lace through hers and his weight holds her, helpless, and when she opens her eyes again his are darkened and watching her. His voice is low and urgent and he needs her to know this.

She's the most beautiful woman he's ever known. He loves her, he's always loved her.

She cannot say the same for him. She hadn't loved him then, but she does love him now and she tells him this.

And he gives her everything she has ever needed.

* * *

><p>When she wakes - not the first time, or even the second, but much much later than that - the sun is strong through the window and he's investigating the book that she's been reading. She blinks sleepily, her limbs heavy with a feeling like molasses flowing through them. She rests her fingers at the edge of the thick black lines inscribed on his skin; the ugliness is still a shock, but she doesn't ask why he keeps it, this symbol of something that he never really believed in; neither of them can pretend that the past is something different. He has changed and he hasn't; he is the better version of the man he has always been.<p>

His fingers twist through her hair and she presses her lips against the scar in his chest.

'We had to read that in high-school,' she says eventually. 'I always loved it. I guess to you it's just chick-lit.'

He puts the book down and his eyebrows go up. 'Now, Ava, that's where you would be wrong. She's a woman who has to make her own way in the world, a woman with spunk.' His hand smoothes down her hair, rests in the curve of her neck. 'I've always admired a woman like that.'

She folds her hands under her chin, smiles up at him. 'I like the ending, when they finally come together - they're equals. He's lost everything, she's all independent. They're the same then. I like that.'

His head tilts slightly, thoughtful. 'I don't think he had lost everything: he always had her, even when he didn't know it.'

They watch each other. She pushes herself up and forward and his hands cup her face as she kisses him.


	24. The Field

_24. The Field_

_**faith** - n. _

_**1** complete trust or confidence_

_**2** duty or commitment to fulfil a trust, promise, etc._

He isn't afraid to show tenderness or affection, even when they aren't alone.

Bowman would have seen it as a weakness. From the start, back when they'd still been in high-school, he would throw an arm around her, holding her so tight she could barely breathe. A ribald comment in front of his friends, pinching her ass when she passed him. She didn't particularly like it, even back then, but she had thought that it was just his way, a roughness that concealed the feelings he didn't know how to express.

Later she had realised the truth. Every embrace was an imprisonment, each caress a threat.

Boyd's hands flutter around her face, brushing her cheeks so lightly she can barely feel them. Only when she leans into him do they rest on her, as though he's been asking for her permission. His voice is soft and gentle, his touch steady.

Devil glances at them, disinterested, Johnny and Arlo barely seem to notice them. Even if they did, he wouldn't care, just like he doesn't care what anyone thinks about anything.

Except for a few. He cares what she thinks. Her and one other, perhaps.

But that not-caring is strength, and in that lack of self-consciousness she feels safer than she has for a long time.

Later, outside the house, she stares out at the field, a dark stretch of grass, stubbled velvet under the starlight. The night air up here is clean, fresh and the mountains look closer, looming black against the sky.

She thinks about Helen's advice. It was good advice, practical, probably wise, but it isn't for her. Loving him isn't a choice, but standing with him is. Her choice, and she'll follow it every step of the way.

It's a still night but there's a chill to the air after the day's heat and she hunches against it, hands plunged deep into the pockets of her plaid jacket. Crickets chirrup in the thickets, their cheerful monotony a familiar and pleasant soundscape. She would think it a near-perfect night if they weren't where they are.

The faint whine of the hinges on the side-door joins the night symphony: open, closed, then the soft tread that she has come to recognise. He leans beside her against the hood of the truck and after a moment his arm goes around her shoulders - enveloping but not quite touching. She sinks into him, her head on his shoulder and she lets out the breath that has been caught behind her ribs for the last few hours. He draws her in, holding her steady.

'Are you okay?'

'I'm fine,' she murmurs, the words breathed against his collar and the light scent of his aftershave. She lifts her head. 'Just looking forward to when we can go home.'

'In the morning,' he says, 'I promise you that.'

She nods. His word, and she believes it because he does not lie to her. She links her fingers through his. 'I meant what I said earlier. I want you to tell me everything.'

'I know.'

'I mean it,' she repeats, firm. 'I don't want you keeping things from me.'

In the half-light she can see the amusement crinkle the corners of his eyes. 'You have a lot of rules.'

'And you better stick to them.'

'Yes, ma'am.'

She tries not to laugh but she can't help it and she is closer to him then, her head tilting back and he kisses her, gentle at first and then harder. She slides her arms around him, under his jacket, feels the warmth of his skin through his shirt.

'Ava.' His hand rests at the base of her throat, his thumb circling the hollow there and his face is suddenly serious. 'If you change your mind at any time, if you wish that we should part, then I will understand and I will not try to stop you.'

She shivers and it isn't against the night air. Sometimes, when he studies her face, it feels like he's trying to memorise her: every line and look and gesture. Saving it up against something. She doesn't want that, not tonight. Her eyebrows go up. 'You trying to get rid of me already?'

He sighs. 'Oh, Ava, I would keep you by my side for the rest of my life. But only if it's what you want.'

'It is what I want,' she tells him.

There's a flicker across his face, almost like impatience, as though she is wilfully misunderstanding him. 'If at some point-'

She places her fingers against his lips. 'Now is when you don't talk.'

She feels him smile. And for a long time neither of them speak.


	25. The Funeral

_25. The Funeral_

_It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them._

_-Deuteronomy 32:35_

'He's still so angry,' she murmurs, staring blindly out of the window.

'Raylan Givens has always been an angry man.'

She's never thought of Raylan in that way but she's too tired to argue the point. It has been a bone-achingly long day and she feels exhausted by it. The curtains get closed against the night and she peels off the black dress, glad to be rid of it. Throughout the day she has been horribly aware that her skirt is too short for a funeral, but it was the best that Harlan had to offer. There had not been time to run up anything better; and Boyd had requested (his word) that she refrain (also his word) from going beyond county lines until the situation is resolved.

Helen wouldn't have minded. Ava can see, clearly, Helen's amused, cynical eyes and hear the drawled comment about wasting good money. No, she wouldn't have minded; but Ava does. Helen deserved better than that.

It hadn't helped seeing Winona.

Not because of the woman herself - all of that is long past - but because Winona had, of course, looked so _perfect_. And Raylan had looked-

She shivers, wraps her arms around herself.

Perhaps Boyd had been right; perhaps Raylan was mad at everything, but just very good at hiding it.

She pulls on an old plaid shirt over her slip, its well-worn familiarity a comfort.

Boyd sits on the bed, still almost fully dressed, hands behind his head and stares at the wall in the same way she had stared out of window. She clambers onto the bed, across to him, and his arms go around her and she draws in the first clear breath she's had all day.

It's a clumsy embrace - she tries to put her arms around him and her knuckles scrape the headboard he's sitting against - but it's real and it's living.

His lips press against the top of her head, her forehead, closed eyes and cheekbones and cheeks until he reaches her mouth. She settles against him, figures fitting together.

'Would you really kill Dickie Bennett if Raylan asked you to?'

'It's the least I can do.'

She moves back, sitting up on her haunches. 'Helen made her own choices. She knew the life she was choosing, it's not like she went into it blind. It's like I said to Arlo-'

'So you were talking to Arlo - I must confess that I had some doubts on that point.'

She tilts her head, leans into the fingers that trace the curve of her cheek. 'Yes, I was talking to Arlo. But the same thing goes for you.'

His hand slips to the back of her head and he draws her to him.

At last, at long last, she feels cared for-

_Life is long_

-and from the most unexpected source.

'If you kill Dickie,' she says after a while, 'Mags will kill you. Then I'll have to kill her.' He frowns, his hand a silent question in the air. 'That's how it works, ain't it? We take revenge for the people we love.'

He lets out a breath. 'It doesn't always have to be that way.'

Her lips tighten, eyebrows rising. 'What, you think it's different for you than it is for me?'

He looks at her down his eyes, speculative. 'Are you trying to prove something here?'

'No!' Defensive. She sighs. 'I don't know. Maybe. I just don't want anything worse than has already happened.'

'Worse?'

She grits her teeth. His hands are warm and steady on her hips. She meets his gaze full-on.

'I don't want anything happening to you. Happy now?'

His fingers perform their courtship dance around her face, glancing across her cheekbones and jaw, twining through her hair. His lips against hers are a mute testimony.

Life and death have always been so close in Harlan County. Too close. But they are alive, her and him. She places her hands flat against his chest and feels the thrum of his heartbeat. She slides her hands down, starts to ease the buttons of his waistcoat through the bindings.

'Are you sure that's a good idea?' His eyes dart to the door. Every now and then there is a creak in the house, low voices. Devil and his buddies keeping watch.

'We'll just both be real quiet,' she says, busy on her task.

'You think you're capable of that?'

She puts her eyebrows up. 'Someone has a mighty high opinion of himself.'

He laughs softly and she allows herself to be lost in him.


	26. The Bullet

_26. The Bullet_

Lysol is the best cleaning product you can buy.

The smell of it is everywhere. One of them, Devil maybe, had been sent to scrub down the table before Boyd carried her through there. Disinfectant and blood together in a stomach-churning mix. She chokes on it.

There is still a faint stain on the wall, only visible in the right light and if you know what you're looking for, but it's there. She's aware of it now, just a few feet from her head.

Bowman's blood on the wall and the floor, seeping into the wood-grain of the table, and then Boyd's, and now hers.

She really should have shot that little son-of-a-bitch when she'd had the chance.

The pain has resolved itself into a burning, numbing ache that claims her entire body. Every beat of her heart sends a fresh pulse of it across every nerve-ending. It's an entity in itself, a living thing that has taken up residence inside of her.

The funny thing is that the pain distracts her from being scared that she might die. She knows it's a distinct possibility but she isn't afraid of it. For that, at least, the pain is her friend.

She thinks again about Helen and wonders, if she doesn't make it through this, will Boyd bury her in the backyard, will he stay in the house to be close to what remains of her; she hopes it will be that and she really hopes that he doesn't put her next to Bowman in the cemetery she has never visited. She needs to tell him this but the effort of getting in enough air to speak is too much and the words catch in the thick gurgle in her throat.

His fingers tighten around hers, the only thing she can feel besides the pain.

And she worries about Boyd because in place of the God he has lost he has given his soul to her and she doesn't know what will happen to it if she isn't there to care for it.

He holds onto her, his head bowed, forehead against the back of her hand, then a kiss pressed against her skin, then his lips moving with words she can't hear; she doesn't know whether it's faith or just desperation but either way she's glad for his sake that he still prays.

There are so many things that she wants to say to him, so many things that she_ wants_ - for both of them, not just for herself.

She tries to dive beneath the pain, sink down and find the words to give to him but his hand slips away from hers. There is another voice, a new voice, and darkness and no more pain.


	27. The Promise

_27. The Promise_

She wonders, sometimes, what their lives would have been had it all been done differently. Not everything, maybe, but a few things. If it hadn't been Raylan she'd had the crush on; if it hadn't been Bowman that she'd married; if she'd been waiting for Boyd when he got back from Kuwait.

She doesn't spend very long on it. Playing what-if is pointless, she learned that lesson. What's past has made them what they are and between them they've built _this_, what they have, here, together.

Except that right now they don't because Boyd's gone back to sleeping in the spare room.

And she can't take another night like this.

He watches her when he thinks she isn't looking. During the day he slides through the rooms of the house, almost noiseless. It's like a haunting _(again)_. By night he's close by until she falls asleep. That first week is a blur but she knows he was there, almost all of the time, and after that, when she would wake in the night, he would be in the chair by the bed, sometimes reading by the light coming from the landing, sometimes asleep, but most often with his eyes fixed on her.

The stitches are out now, the dressing little more than a plaster and the itching is driving her crazy.

She feels like throwing her head back and screaming.

Instead, she pushes back the bedclothes, swings herself upright. There is the faint pull in her shoulder and she winces but it passes. She examines the wound. Such a small thing, she thinks. There'll be a scar there and she remembers the marks on his body and she smiles to herself wryly: they'll match.

She looks automatically for her slippers but can't find them and decides she doesn't need them, or her robe, or any lights. She moves quietly at first, on tip-toe, then remembers that she wants to wake him up. On the landing she stands for a moment, blinking against the dark, then walks to the pale rectangle of his door, grasps the handle and pushes it open.

It feels cool in there, the curtains only half-closed and stirring in the night-breeze. The room is picked out in hazy moonlight and she smells clean air scented by jasmine, incipient rain and then another, less-defined scent that she knows is him. She takes a step, floorboards squeaking under her feet and the dark tumble of blankets and sheets on the mattress moves, sudden, a jack-knife motion.

'Ava?'

'Yes,' she whispers back, and again wonders why. Something about the dark, perhaps. She pads across, eases herself down onto the mattress before he can struggle up off it.

'Baby, what's wrong?' His voice is roughened, thick with the sleep he's trying to shake off.

'Can't sleep,' she tells him, already sliding beside him, settling the sheet over both of them. She puts her head on his shoulder, presses him back until they lie together. She hears the breath shake through his chest and his hand comes to rest in the middle of her back; its warmth seeps through, thick honey running along her spine. She hadn't realised how badly she needed this until now, when she curls herself around him and feels her own restlessness ease.

'You said I could go anytime I wanted,' she begins softly.

He stiffens, then sighs, resignation colouring the note; he seems to breathe in the scent of her hair, his lips lingering against it for a moment. 'Yes.'

She wonders how anyone as smart as he is can be so stupid. She pushes herself up and stares into his face fiercely.

'Well, I ain't giving you the same choice. You don't get to leave me, Boyd Crowder. Not ever.'

It's a look of wonder on his face and then the backs of his fingers touch her cheek. 'Is that a promise, Ava?'

'Yes, it is,' she says faithfully, her hand over his heart.

_Fin_


	28. Author Note

**Author Note:**

First, a huge thank-you to everyone who has read this fic - you are awesome. Second, an even bigger thank-you to the even more awesome people who commented; some of you have been reviewing every step of the way and I really appreciate your input.

I have a tendency to put together 'soundtracks' for the fics I write - a collection of tunes that would be heard on screen if this were actually being watched instead of read. If you are interested, it is available to download, after the usual prefixes, here: megaupload(dot)com/?d=KPQBWFNF


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